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Saturday, June 27, 2009

Family Reunion Themed Preview: Winnipeg

“Psychotic Cousin No One Wants To Acknowledge”

He’s the guy that none of the family publicly admits to being related to. In fact, he wasn’t even invited to the reunion but he somehow found out and showed up (much to the chagrin of everyone else). Now everyone is trying desperately to avoid getting stuck in a conversation with him. He’s crazy, prone to nonsensical rambling, he has anger management issues, the list goes on and on. Everyone would be a lot happier if he just disappeared.

Well no one can question the fact that Mike Kelly is a man of action. He has been a very busy man since taking office in December. In just 6 short months he has managed to publicly insult his predecessor, replace 3/4 of his roster, question longstanding league rules, get reprimanded by the league and necessitate a written apology from the team on his behalf. Not sure when he found time to sleep.

While Mike Kelly is clearly mad, the question is, will there turn out to be method to his madness? He replaced all-stars along the O-line with second string Riders. He let some very good assistant coaches go. He’s going to field essentially a new defense featuring the oldest front 4 in recent memory. And the competition for the leader of his new offense is between a south paw and a side arm thrower (it’s like the QB freak show minus giant Chad Freihauf). All that and we haven’t even mentioned that his solution to having the worst kicking game in the league is to bring back the kicker responsible for that dubious distinction.

Verdict: In the long term, there’s an outside chance Kelly’s crazy plan might end up working out… but in the short term it will be like most Manitoba residents… not pretty.Dead last in the league at 4 -14